Gems - Kill the One You Love (2015)

When Lindsay Pitts and Clifford John Usher first met, it felt as if they d known each other in another life. They began collaborating immediately, and in 2013 released Medusa, a collection of songs with a remarkably crystalline vision. Lindsay s haunting and deeply emotive vocals provide the backbone for Clifford s dark and dreamy production, balancing gauzy atmospherics with emotional heft.
GEMS music is very much about the transformative power of song. It embraces pop s form and structure, as well as its proclivity for distilling emotions to a point, but it reaches for something deeper, searching for those authentic and raw human truths that reside in the shadowland of the soul.
Their debut full length, Kill the One You Love, is a further indulgence in GEMS evocative, existential longing. The songs play out like a series of confessions. They are the secrets written in diaries, the unspoken lament to a lover. The title, a reference to Chuck Palahniuk s Fight Club, shrouds the project in a funerary cloud, alluding to the death of a relationship, the death of love, the loss of self. And yet there is a sense of hope that pervades the album, hope that some ray of light may find its way through the darkness.